The Alchemist's Lair: Final Part

As soon as we found them, we released the remaining half of our soldiers. Thankfully, the bandits didn’t think to hurt them in retaliation for our escape, or were preoccupied with other issues at the time. The ones more skilled in medicine went to take proper care of the wounded, removing bullets, sewing the wounds, and disinfecting them with cheap booze found in the bandits’ stash. The brigands were, luckily, well-supplied, and we camped in their former hideout for a few more days, until Rhombus and Gandor somewhat stabilized and we finished building improvised carts that could be used to transport them. We also spent time gathering hadrosaurs that scattered after Andre and Julia set the stables ablaze. I should also mention that my wound healed surprisingly fast; I could walk properly in a day, and before we left the facility, I was pretty much in full health.

As soon as everyone was in good enough health to travel, we left the camp, Iocasta deftly navigating us towards the road. After reaching the first settlement, we decided to take another few days’ rest, now that we had access to slightly more comfort, as well as the services of a professional healer and a herbalist. This is where we parted ways with the captive bandits, leaving them to what passed for local authorities in this remote corner of the country. I never inquired about their ultimate fate, but I doubt it was anything good.

When it was time to go, we procured carts to replace the ones we lost to bandits. During the return journey, Gandor and Rhombus also journeyed on the cart. The young noble, despite our protest, initially insisted on riding his hadrosaur, but that proved sufficiently painful and exhausting that he was forced to swallow his pride. To Iocasta’s relief, Civet was too absorbed in sorting out the material he gathered from Nestor’s laboratory to make any further delays observing local flora or rock formations.

Annabel spent the initial part of the journey in an uncharacteristically quiet and somber mood, lost deep in thought. Eventually, she took me up on the promise to hear her out. I don’t think I had anything particularly helpful to say, but the conversations did help her sort out her feelings about the incident. She did attack with the intent to kill, and she was as much at peace with that aspect of the situation as can be expected from a healthy person. The possibility of getting into mortal combat was very real in her chosen line of work, so she was prepared for it in theory, and while she had no natural propensity for violence like, for instance, Rhombus, she had grown up in a war-torn country where slaying your enemies in battle was nothing to feel guilty about. As for the needlessly cruel manner in which Goyko was dispatched, she still felt responsible for his excessive suffering, and I couldn’t lie and convince her that wasn’t the case. I still believed, and she herself confirmed, that she had intended to end the fight quickly, overestimating the potency of her flames, but I don’t think lack of intention fully absolves one of responsibility for one’s actions. Nothing could be done to fix this situation, however, so Annabel decided to swear off using fire magic, attempting to find a less cruel manner of magical combat, paying careful attention to how her spells would impact the human anatomy. She also decided to donate her earnings from this expedition to the temple of Mithra, as a form of penance. I suggested she could return to academic research of magic if she found her new calling morally dubious, and she did seriously ponder it, but she had already tasted high adventure once, and in spite of all the unpleasantness adventuring entails, she was already addicted. I assume it was partly out of this guilt that she took up basic medicine at first(though that had a practical purpose as we lacked a medic in our core team), and later became proficient in rare and complex healing magic. But I’m skipping ahead once more.

During these conversations, I became keenly aware of my lack of emotional response to having killed another man. Thus, I began feeling guilty about not feeling any guilt, if that makes any sense. I grew up in an environment where killing isn’t treated as matter-of-factly as it is in my present world, and thus was taught that taking another’s life is, while sometimes justified, always a heavy burden upon the killer. This idea remained in my head forever, and since I intellectually knew I should feel bad, yet I didn’t, I began to think something was wrong with me. Either it was a deficiency of my personality, which I failed to notice during my first dull and peaceful shot at life, or it was a quirk of my new body’s design. I wasn’t particularly comfortable with either option.

Leaving introspection aside, our return journey was uneventful. At some point, we encountered a caravan that was dispatched to deliver our ransom money to the bandits. Needless to say, they were pleased we sorted that problem out ourselves, and we continued towards the capital together.

Thus ended my first assignment with the Royal Treasure Hunters. It was considered a success, but a costly one – we lost three men, and had multiple badly injured. Civet and Balthazar managed to copy roughly half of what was stored in the Borchian machine, and I’m not certain how much of it proved useful in the future, but at least some future epidemics were nipped in the bud thanks to knowledge gleaned from these documents. Our squad, having proven to function together, remained unchanged during my tenure with the Treasure Hunters, and we went on numerous expeditions together – some of which will be described in the following chapters.